Tomorrow night, two months before his 21st birthday, Phil Hughes will take the mound at Yankee Stadium as the best pitching prospect in baseball, and the best New York has seen since Dwight Gooden. In better circumstances, he might have pitched in the minor leagues for a few more months, apprenticed in the Yankees bullpen for a time, and then taken a rotation spot either later in the summer or next year. As things have turned, he will bear not only the immense pressure of his reputation, but the burden of having to restore order to a Yankees rotation that has, due to injuries and failures, gone from a strength to a liability in three weeks.

In several ways, the Yankees are compromising their own interests by turning to Hughes under these conditions. That doesn’t mean that promoting Hughes right now will prove to be a mistake — he may, right now, be their best pitcher. But it’s at best a curious way to protect one of the game’s more valuable assets.

The main problem is that the Yankees have two mutually opposed interests right now. The first, and I think clearly the most important, is ensuring that Hughes is put in the best possible situation for his long-term development. The second is winning. This creates a variety of conflicts. There is no doubt that in an ideal world Hughes would spend a few months testing himself against experienced hitters at Triple-A and that his first major league games would be of little or no consequence. Whether or not one agrees, one can understand why the Yankees would put a higher priority on not falling deep into a hole by the end of April than on creating the ideal environment for the development of a young pitcher, but one can’t ignore the costs of doing so.

Somewhat less obviously, these opposing interests cause conflicts that will either lead to the Yankees getting far less out of Hughes than he has to offer, thus making his call up essentially irrelevant, or to them putting his career and potential at risk in exchange for a fix to a temporary and easily solved problem.

It’s generally accepted that 20-year-old pitchers should not throw many more than 100 pitches in major league games. There are all sorts of exceptions, a few 115-pitch outings are not going to cause a healthy arm to fall off, and pitch counts are really just a proxy measure for fatigue, but 100 pitches is a good rule of thumb. Unless Hughes springs onto the mound fully formed tomorrow night, that’s going to leave him as a fiveinning pitcher, which is exactly what the Yankees, suffering from a badly taxed bullpen, don’t really need right now.

Similarly, there are good reasons to restrict pitchers this young from throwing certain pitches in the majors. Seattle leaned on their own phenom, Felix Hernandez, to rely on his fastball last year, the idea being that the concentration demanded by the majors is stressful enough without the armstraining effects of curves and sliders. Hernandez is on the disabled list right now anyway, but the idea that an exceptionally young pitcher should learn how to get hitters out by locating his fastball rather than relying on breaking balls is a reasonable one. Hughes throws a slider and a curveball; with the team losing ground in the standings, is he going to be told to lay off them?

The dilemma is pretty clear: Keep Hughes on a leash in terms of innings and pitch selection in an effort to keep him strong for the long term, and you take away much of what makes him such a good option for the rotation in the first place. You use him to the extent of his full abilities and risk turning him into the next Mark Prior, or hold off in the hopes that he’ll turn into what Prior could have been, while losing yet more ballgames. And this dilemma branches off into a whole set of large, unanswerable questions. Is putting Hughes in a position where his failure will harm the team risking his confidence, or just exposing him to the realities of pitching for the Yankees? If young pitchers get hurt whether they’re coddled or not, might it not be best to throw them in the deep end and see who can swim? And since the Yankees are always in a pennant race, when should he be brought up, if not now? Is there any real difference between being told you have to save the team’s season in April and being told the same thing in June?

I don’t think the Yankees are in the midst of a real pitching crisis. As horrible as Kei Igawa has looked so far, he has a long track record of success in a good league, and it’s too early to write him off based on a few bad starts. Chien-Ming Wang is back, and Mike Mussina will be back in a week. It’s important to keep a certain perspective on what happens in April, as well; a few injuries and a stretch of three weeks of sub-.500 baseball, even involving a sweep at the hands of the Red Sox, wouldn’t induce panic in anyone if they took place in August.

Still, it’s one thing to hold this opinion, and another to be in the position where you’re expected to do something. In the end, I don’t think you can fault the Yankees too much for this decision. Assuming Joe Torre doesn’t do anything outlandishly foolish like ask him to throw 180 pitches in a rainstorm or hold a press conference to announce his expectation that Hughes will win the Cy Young Award and save the Yankees’ season, Hughes will, in the long term, almost certainly do whatever it is he was going to do anyway. This might be precipitous, but we’re talking about a grown man playing baseball here, not fretting over whether it’s too soon to send a shy toddler to preschool.

Misgivings and all, I haven’t been this excited about a debut since Jose Reyes played his first game as a Met. Remember how that went? A much-hyped 19-year-old is called up to the majors before he’s quite ready, is moved off his position the next year to accommodate a bum, promptly gets injured, and proves that he really, really wasn’t ready for the majors, prompting much talk of how he’d been ruined by overeager managers. That story turned out alright, and I’d bet that Hughes’s will, too.

tmarchman@nysun.com